Electronic design automation (EDA) tools or applications are generally used by circuit developers to design integrated circuits (ICs). An IC may include many blocks of logic circuitry, registers, memory blocks, input/output (I/O) blocks, etc. These blocks may be configurable to perform different tasks. A generic routing or interconnection structure is typically used to connect the various blocks and circuitries within the IC in different ways. All these configurations are usually done using an EDA tool.
Designing an IC on an EDA tool generally includes, among others, floorplanning, synthesizing and translating the register transfer level (RTL) description of the circuit into a discrete netlist of logic-gate primitives, placing and routing the many components of the synthesized gate-level netlist, and analyzing and optimizing the IC to reduce power usage. Power analysis and optimization is one of the most important areas in circuit design.
Reducing power consumption and optimizing circuits for power dissipation is important to circuit developers. With the increasing speed and complexity in IC designs, power consumption is regarded as one of the limiting factors in IC designs. The increasing complexity also means that a completely manual power optimization is not generally feasible because the process will be too cumbersome and prone to contain errors. Therefore, a typical EDA tool will include a variety of power optimization techniques that can be used to optimize an IC design. However, some power optimizations that require a functional change to the design cannot be done automatically. These changes require user interaction because they usually require modifications to be made to the design structure.
Therefore, it is desirable to quickly point out the areas of potential optimization on an IC and provide circuit developers with real-time feedback based on the changes made. It is also desirable to update the design and perform power analysis based on multiple changes made to the design without having to perform a full compilation on the design. It is within this context that the invention arises.